


The Way Ghosts Wait

by agentx13 (rebelle_elle)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, sharon carter appreciation month, yeah there's a bit of sharon/steve but i think it won't hurt anyone's feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 21:46:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10448256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelle_elle/pseuds/agentx13
Summary: When he can’t take it anymore, he leaves. He tries to thank T’Challa first, tries to show that he understands what they’re doing for him, that he appreciates it, but sometimes he can’t stand to stay anymore. He thinks T’Challa, the Black Panther, understands what it’s like to have something inside that grows restless, a beast, a monster, athingthat won’t stop gnawing at what’s left of his soul.Bucky leaves Wakanda sometimes when he gets overwhelmed by his healing process. He has no set destination in mind. He occasionally runs into Sharon Carter, who is also on the run. Over time, she becomes the closest thing he has to a friend. They won't be anything more - he's too broken, she's spoken for. But his life is nothing if not weird.





	

The first time she sees him after the exchange in Germany, it’s after a shoot-out with Hydra. He pulls her out of her flipped-over car and lifts her to her feet. She’d only been able to see his boots at first, and when she sees him, she’s glad she hadn’t tried to shoot him.

She leans against the car and studies him while she gets her breath back. “You’re not going to try and kill me this time, are you?”

There’s only a brief hint of pain in his eyes, and then he says, “That depends on how good your Russian is, I guess.”

She nods and looks up and down the road. With the Hydra agents dead, they might be the only two people around for miles. “My Russian’s shit.”

“Good.” He drops to the ground and pulls her duffel from the back seat. He sets it beside her feet and steps away.

“Good,” she echoes. One of the Hydra agents is pinned to the tree by a motorcycle; it’s her handiwork. The other is scuffed up, still bleeding from a head wound, but she can see the bullet hole between the eyes. His work. “You do team ups?”

“No.”

She nods. She hadn’t expected him to say yes. After a moment, she turns back to her car to see if there’s anything she can salvage. She has the awful suspicion she’ll have to walk back to town.

“Don’t tell Steve you saw me.”

By the time she turns back to him, he’s gone.

* * *

He isn’t healed. He may never get everything they did to him out of his head. The Wakandans do what they can, but so much of it involves triggering him over and over again.

And whenever he loses sight of who he is, the only option is to freeze again. When he comes out, he feels once more like a stranger in his own skin. No, not like a stranger, like the thing he’d been forced to become.

When he can’t take it anymore, he leaves. He tries to thank T’Challa first, tries to show that he understands what they’re doing for him, that he appreciates it, but sometimes he can’t stand to stay anymore. He thinks T’Challa, the Black Panther, understands what it’s like to have something inside that grows restless, a beast, a monster, a _thing_ that won’t stop gnawing at what’s left of his soul.

T’Challa never tries to stop him from leaving, but he knows that if he ever takes too long to come back, T’Challa will come for him. Because no one understands the need to keep a beast on a leash better.

In the end, he always goes back. Because the words need to be out of his head. Because he needs to be himself again, whoever he is, and because if he wants to truly reclaim himself, it’s what he must do.

* * *

She finds herself suited to the life of a fugitive. She’s a ghost, a nonentity. Her problems are inconsequential to the task at hand. A cog in the machine never matters when the machine works.

She misses her family, the collection of friends who had become so close they were what she considers family. But then, most of them are already dead, and the ones who aren’t dead are almost always out of reach anyway. Looking at it that way, she’s been a ghost for years, just a ghost with a paycheck.

She next spots him on a rooftop across from a soiree. She’s there pretending to be an escort to explore the rest of the building. She can only imagine what he’s there for. Taking her glass of champagne to the window, she gives him a miniscule wave.

After a minute, there’s a light held up from across the street. It disappears and reappears in fragments, and she grins when she realizes he’s saying “H-I” in morse code. It’s the closest thing she’s had to friendship in months, and she turns away before she can imagine that it is more than it is. They’re just a couple of ghosts, a couple of cogs. Invisible to the world at large for however long they need to be.

Thinking they matter, even to each other, will be the beginning of the end.

* * *

She’s wearing a different outfit. She can’t help it, he knows. Ball gowns would never fit in at a bar in Chile. He has changed, too, though nothing so drastic. Just his red shirt instead of a navy blue one. Even his baseball cap is the same.

It’s a joke now that they run into each other like they do. It takes two points to establish a pattern, and here they are at three. He wonders if she’s on a mission this time. She always seems to be on a mission. He never is unless he can’t settle his nerves any other way.

He slides onto the stool beside her. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” There’s a trace of his old confidence in his voice, and he can admit to himself that he’s proud of it, of the part of him that had tried to flirt with people while on the run before Steve had found him. He’d been trying to heal, trying to rediscover himself, and flirting isn’t as easy as it used to be, but it comes more easily than it has in the past couple years.

She startles and looks at him, brown eyes sizing him up in less than a second. “That depends.” There’s a faint pause, and he remembers the first time they’d spoken, when she had asked if he was going to try and kill her again. He tenses. “You gonna buy me a drink?”

The tension fades, and he even flashes her a brief, shy smile. “No money,” he admits.

She whistles. “That’s a bad start.”

Made brave by how she isn’t running or trying to shoot him, he says, “Better than getting triggered and trying to kill you.”

Her eyes dance. “Hey. I came out of that looking pretty epic, thanks. I kicked you in the head. All you managed to do was throw me into a table.”

He pulls the bowl of nuts closer, suddenly desperate for something to do with his hands. “I’m sorry about that. All of it.”

She shrugs. “You were made to do it. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I still did it.”

She looks at him, her fingers sliding along the glass to play with the condensation. “Somebody brainwashed me to do something, would you put a bullet in me or in the person controlling me?”

He doesn’t answer. Can’t. It’s different when it’s other people.

The silence grows awkward, and he can’t think of a way to fix it. He should go, he thinks. He shouldn’t have come. He didn’t know why he could, except that she was... safe. She had helped Steve and Sam, has risked everything to do it. She wouldn’t turn on him. She wasn’t as invested in him as Steve was. She was someone he could pass by, take or leave, and it could be nice or nothing at all.

“How’s the...” she points to her head. She looks as awkward as he feels, though she hides it behind a steady gaze. Still, there’s a stiffness to her lumbar region that clearly speaks of discomfort.

“Better,” he says. “Don’t have all of it out yet. But it’s... they’re great.”

She nods. “I’ve heard amazing things about Wakanda. And the students they’re sending abroad are putting universities to shame.” She quirks her lips. “Glad none of them enrolled at SHIELD, or else my rank would’ve been lower than it was.”

She’d managed to get hits against the Winter Soldier. He doubts her rank was all that low. “The Wakandans are great,” he says instead, casting about for something to say.

“They give you a hall pass?”

He shrugs. “I need to get out sometimes. They understand.”

“But you don’t want me to tell Steve.”

He shakes his head. “No.”

She nods, then takes a breath. “I messed this up, didn’t I?”

He shakes his head again, his fingers turning a peanut over and over and over again. “No.”

She makes a face. She doesn’t believe it, but he does. He’s the one that’s failed the conversation. She gets to her feet. “I should go anyway. My mark’s on the move.”

He nods and doesn’t look over his shoulder, doesn’t want to risk her mark noticing something amiss. After she’s gone, he looks over the menu, frowning at the prices and wondering if the bartender had overheard him say he doesn’t have money. Catching the bartender’s glare, he decides that the bartender heard him. He offers the man a grin and slinks away.

He tails her from a distance. Watches her get closer to the mark. Keeps his hands in his pockets and off his gun. He isn’t there to protect her, just there to make sure she’s okay. It isn’t as if they know each other, not really.

He watches her for three hours. She talks with the mark, flirts with him, and when she’s done, slams his head into a door before taking out three of his guards with impressive speed, he nods and slips back into the shadows.

* * *

The next time, it’s Notting Hill on a Saturday. The press of people is so thick she almost misses him, but she stops and backtracks, waiting silently at the corner of the stall as he sorts through books. He selects two, pays for them, and she turns to walk beside him.

“You’re not going to try and kill me again, are you?”

She smirks at him. “Depends. You going to try and make me pay for your drink again?”

He glances at her, and she can see why Hydra used him the way they did. He can be menacing, sure. She knows about the Winter Soldier. But looking at him now, it’s impossible to reconcile the Winter Soldier with the man standing beside her now. He looks harmless, soft. Vulnerable. “I have money this time. Let me pay.”

Her eyebrows go up. The best case scenario she had played out in her head was teasing. The most likely scenario was more awkwardness like their last run-in. At this point, they’ve crossed paths enough to qualify as friends. Or as close to friends as spies can get.

“Only if we can start over,” she says. She holds out her hand. “I’m Sharon.”

He shakes her hand. The other hand, the one with the glove on it despite the heat, stays at his side. “Bucky is as good as anything, I guess.”

“Long name,” she muses.

He shrugs. “They add one every decade.”

She snorts. “Then shouldn’t you be ‘Bucky Bartholomew Barnabas Baker Brantley Bentley...'” She starts counting off on her fingers. “Buchanan Bell Brian Barney Bubba Barnes?”

“Ha, ha,” he says. He steers them toward a pub and doesn’t speak again until they’re sitting. “Bubba?”

“Benjamin,” she suggests instead, on a roll. “Blake. Bradley.”

He leans forward to hide his face behind his menu.

“Hard to see with your old-people eyes, huh?” She smirks at him, but she thinks, just for a moment, that he doesn’t seem displeased by the teasing. Which is good, since he could snap her in half if he wanted to.

“I have half a mind to ground you, young lady.”

Definitely not displeased. She grins, but before she can tease more, he asks what she wants and orders for them both at the bar. When he returns, the ribbing takes a backseat to discussion about different missions they’ve gone on. Neither of them care to divulge all the details of anything they’ve done, though, and they become adept at recognizing the pause as the other decides what they don’t want to say and talking of something else instead.

When they leave the pub, they’re discussing the finer points of different weapons. She is staunchly loyal to her FNP-45 Tactical, and Bucky tries to convince her that other guns are better. It’s an argument she knows she can’t win, but she won’t give up her case, either.

She smiles when they part, trying to pretend the pain in her chest isn’t there. She doesn’t get to talk like this with many people anymore, doesn’t get to be honest about who she is. She knows she’ll miss it before he even disappears, but if nothing else, she’s confident they’ll see each other again. After all, they’ve run into each other enough without trying to. And she’d made a point to tell him that she was now freelance and had given him her emergency number in case he wanted help with something.

She doubted he would call. But at least he had a way to get in touch if he needed it.

* * *

He doesn’t call the number. He stares at the piece of paper in his hand, committing the number to memory, and then destroys it as thoroughly as he knows how, but he doesn’t call the number.

She’s his only real connection to the world. Beyond Brooklyn and Steve Rogers, beyond Wakanda and T’Challa. She is the one who looks at him and doesn’t see something that needs to be hunted down or fixed. Or someone, rather.

She doesn’t look at him as if he’s damaged. He wants that. He wants people to look at him without pain, the look that says, “You killed people. You killed people I know. You killed people I loved.”

T’Challa has told him it isn’t Bucky’s fault that T’Chaka is dead, and Bucky knows, logically, T’Challa doesn’t blame him for T’Chaka’s death.

It’s hard to forget, in the shade of a statue of T’Chaka, that someone had used Bucky’s likeness to kill the beloved former king.

The next time he feels the urge to leave Wakanda, it isn’t just because he’s running away.

He can’t bring himself to call her. The act of reaching out unsettles him. He doesn’t need to reach out. He doesn’t need everything he’d had in his old life. He doesn’t want it. Not until everything Hydra put in his head is out.

He finds himself staring at his phone anyway.

He doesn’t call.

* * *

It’s seven months before she sees him again. She knows he’s seen her before, though, because it’s too much of a coincidence that he shows up out of the blue when everything has gone to hell in a handbasket. She hadn’t meant to get into a fight, had only meant to poke around so she could form a plan. She can’t afford to be stupid, she knows that. She hadn’t meant to be stupid. But she’d been stupid nonetheless.

It had never occurred to her that someone would recognize her. She’s spent her life as a ghost for so long. But no, one of her mark’s friends had been at her aunt’s funeral. She’d just had to honor Aunt Peggy, she grouses.

But, even as her fist folds someone’s nose like an accordion, she has to think that it’s worth it.

One of the men grabs her hair and yanks her head back, and then Bucky is there. Only this isn’t Bucky, his moves are too vicious. And his eyes are too aware for it to be the Winter Soldier.

She picks off the people he doesn’t, barely getting a couple hits in before he’s taken care of them as well. And then he’s in front of her, looking her over for any signs of injury and pressing a hand gently to her head; it comes away with blood, and his eyes darken.

“We should spar sometime,” she suggests. They’re surrounded by violence and its remnants, and she tries to keep her tone light because she knows his expression, the one that says she might not be allowed out to play anymore, that she’s too soft and fragile to be surrounded by violence. But she doesn’t know who she is without the violence anymore, and she won’t give it up.

He growls at her. “Never,” he spits. He pauses, and she realizes he’s trying to figure out whether he should pick her up or not.

She takes a step back. “Never,” she tells him. She isn’t some prize to be carried or damsel who can’t figure out how to walk.

“You can’t clean that on your own.”

She glares at him. “Fine. This way.” She leads him to her hotel. A hotel, because tourists don’t have safe houses. She has to stop twice along the way, once to vomit and once to dry heave. By the time she gets to her room, she’s stumbling more than she wants to admit, and she’s almost tempted to lean against him.

He keeps his distance, though, and follows her into her room. “They think you’re drunk.” He locks the door behind her; she’s too tired to care.

“They would.” She digs her first-aid kit out of her suitcase in the closet.

After a moment, he leaves with the ice bucket. When he returns, she realizes he’d lifted her key without her even noticing. Either he’s that good, or she hit her head harder than she thought.

She wets a handcloth in the sink and hisses as she tries to clean the wound. Her vision blurs as she keeps working, and when it clears again, he’s steadying her. She leans against him, one of his arms wrapped around her as he cleans the wound with his other hand. She tries to tell him that she can do this on her own, thanks, but it comes out as an unintelligible slur that even she can’t make out.

The next several hours are spent in and out of consciousness. At one point, she could swear he’s watching baseball, the announcer speaking swiftly in Spanish. She wakes up at some point and eats a little, wakes up again to throw it up. She sees him on a cell phone, but she falls asleep again before she can comment on it.

When she finally wakes and manages to keep her food down and stay awake for over an hour, she almost can’t believe it.

“Okay. I grudgingly admit that you might have saved my ass, Barnes.”

He smiles then, a slow, hesitant, shy smile. “I did it grudgingly,” he tells her.

* * *

There’s a shift between them after that. Bucky isn’t accustomed to anyone feeling comfortable with him. He suspects she only relaxes around him at first because of the concussion, but then she holds down food and answers the questions he asks. Her coordination improves, her vision is clear, and she still doesn’t seem to mind that he’s there.

He stays another night to make sure she doesn’t relapse. That’s what he tells himself. It has nothing to do with how nice it is to sit around watching baseball without people asking him questions or monitoring him.

He doesn’t leave the day after, though. She pulls out maps and plots where she’ll go next. She keeps her plans to herself, but he doesn’t mind.

“Still hiding from Steve?” she asks after she places an order for room service.

He pointedly eyes her assortment of maps. The suitcase holds passports and currency for different countries, enough to get her to a stash of more money in almost any direction. “Is that what you’re doing?”

She shrugs. “He’s busy.”

“So am I,” he says, voice flat.

They eat in silence. She doesn’t seem entirely relaxed around him anymore, but when he sees her grab a stack of maps while staring at him, he understands why. She’s stubborn and offended a the thought that she’s hiding from anyone, and she’ll do what she wants, damn his thoughts on the matter. She’ll keep hiding, or whatever she’s doing, as long as it pleases her.

He likes that about her. He hopes no one takes it away from her the way they did him.

* * *

He finds her more often after that. She knows the Wakandans are trying to help him but doesn’t press for details. Their talks become less about their past, less about Steve, and more about different sports games that they watch when they go to bars or how to dismantle Hydra. Their most heated arguments are about how Hydra came to be so strong in the first place; they never talk about his involvement, but try to identify the people in charge. Some of the people she had grown up with; they had played with her while Aunt Peggy had been busy.

She only realizes when he isn’t there, when she is alone in an endless string of strange cities, that Hydra had been feeling her out. She had trusted the kindness of her aunt’s friends because she had thought they, like so many people, were inherently good.

She stops trusting kindness. It’s been a while since she thought people were inherently good. Now she watches more carefully and doesn’t trust anything unless she can see its dark side, identify what brings a person shame.

She trusts him, though. She knows more of his demons and his soul’s shadows than most. He is real. He is there when she needs him most, though she knows better than to rely on his fortuitous timing. But he does not hide his flaws from her, evidently assuming that she already knows many of them.

She does. She still knows how to access files she shouldn’t even know about.

When he shows up, she no longer thinks anything of sharing a bed with him. He never tries anything, and neither does she. They sleep with guns under their pillows. Sharon has two; Bucky has eight within each reach. He lectures her on the virtues of paranoia. She lectures him on wasting ammo when any former assassin worth his salt would only need two guns, then turns the conversation to what moves could be used to subdue their opponents. The argument leads to an impromptu sparring session that leaves her in bed with bruised ribs and a sore ass for days.

“That’s why you said no to sparring,” she says as he sets an ice pack on her back. Despite how cold it is, it feels divine.

“You know why I said no to sparring.” Another ice pack goes on her knee. “This wasn’t it.”

She whistles. “This was you holding back? I knew I should have started sparring with you sooner.” This time, he says nothing, and after a moment, she interrupts the baseball game with, “So you’re not as worried about him coming out anymore?”

There’s a quick shake of his head. Sometimes she wonders if he’s made peace with the Winter Soldier being a part of him, but he doesn’t seem so fond of the Winter Soldier when he’s putting ice packs on her.

He stays with her despite her assurances that she’s fine. When she sees him next, he’s cut his hair, and he has a woman with him. She has no body fat to speak of, and Sharon can admit that she’s envious of the woman’s muscles. The woman’s head is shaved, her eyes sharp, ever miniscule gesture a promise of pain to anyone who crosses her. She has the darkest skin Sharon has ever seen. Sharon breaks away from the vender and heads over.

“Sparring partner,” Bucky says.

When they are alone, the woman kicks her ass. Time and time and time again, and Sharon grins and tries to memorize the moves. “You’re going easy on me, aren’t you?”

“You’re just a former SHIELD agent, aren’t you? If I did not go easy on you, I would likely kill you. The way you fight, I might not even notice you are dead until I am done beating you.” The woman doesn’t speak much, but when she does, her accent is light.

She doesn’t take offense that SHIELD agents are lightweights. Compared to this woman, they are. “No wonder you and Bucky are hanging out.”

The woman only stays a day. Sharon likes to think she’s won an iota of grudging respect from her, but she never drops a hint. Everything from the woman’s gestures to her glances are weapons, and she is in full control of herself completely.

Bucky stays three more days, the first two to order room service and let her use him as a pillow, the third to go out on the town and explore a little.

As sore as she is, it’s the closest thing to happiness she’s known in a long time.

* * *

He sees her a couple more times. The Wakandans aren’t so worried about him going out anymore; he suspects they think he’ll just track down Sharon and hang out with her.

They’re not wrong. He no longer leaves because he feels the walls of his cage pressing in. Now he leaves because he fears she’ll get in over her head when he isn’t there.

Steve hasn’t texted her in months. Bucky has never pried into their relationship, has never wanted to. But after a couple months of no news of Steve whatsoever, she’s worried. She flips through the news channels and looks online for anything pertaining to Steve that isn’t about him shacking up with random women, one of whom claimed to have given birth to the latest incarnation of the Jersey Devil.

“No news is good news, right?”

“Yeah,” she says with a smile he doesn’t believe for a second.

In the end, he distracts her by letting her try out the moves she’d learned from Okoye. Eventually, she’s tired enough that she curls up against his side and watches baseball with him until she falls asleep.

Watching the game, afraid that turning it off will wake her, he realizes that he doesn’t like watching baseball. But she turns it to the game a lot, so he figures she likes it. She’s one of the few people he would watch baseball for.

He leaves the next day. He’s tracked down Steve before, but never made contact. Thoughout the night, though, he’d thought about it more and more, and now he can’t help but wonder if Steve is in trouble. He’s been so busy covering Sharon’s six that he hasn’t worried much about the guy with super soldier serum.

Steve’s eyes widen when Bucky makes contact.

“It isn’t permanent,” Bucky says. “They’re still working on fixing me. Sharon was worried because you stopped texting her.”

“Didn’t know what to say,” Steve says, frowning. “You’re with Sharon?”

“Sometimes.” Bucky watches Steve as if he can see all the things neither of them can say in the air between them. The missed opportunities, the regrets, the things they’ve lost. They’re men out of time. Men without countries. Men without homes. “I’m going to tell her you’re okay so she stops worrying.” He closes his mouth to keep his admonishment for his best friend from slipping out. Steve is no longer the punk kid from Brooklyn. “She might want to know why you’ve stopped texting.”

“I’m busy,” Steve says. It falls flat. He waves a hand around them. “She doesn’t deserve this. She got declared a traitor because of me. Before that, she lost her job because I insisted on bringing down SHIELD. I can’t keep screwing up her life. When things settle down.”

Bucky stares at him. “They won’t settle, Steve. You know they won’t.”

“I just need to finish up a few things. I promise.”

Bucky glances around. They don’t have long before Wilson comes, and Wilson will be harder to get away from than Steve. Steve can let Bucky go, has before. Wilson would view that as giving up, and Wilson doesn’t give up. “Better be careful, Steve. Your girl isn’t going to wait around forever. Somebody else might make a move on her.”

“That gonna be you, Buck?”

Bucky shrugs. “Maybe.”

Steve raises an eyebrow. “I’m not gonna be out of the picture forever.”

“Look us up after you’re done, then. And stay safe until then, jerk.”

* * *

Bucky sends her a text, of all things, the first time he’s texted her as long as they’ve known each other. Sharon would think it was a prank if the text could possibly have come from anyone else. “Checked on Steve. He’s fine. Busy as usual.” The ellipses bubble pops up. It takes forever to disappear again, but eventually it pops up. She checks her phone at random times, and just as randomly, the bubble is there. He never types anything more, though. Maybe he’s butt-texting her and realizing it before he sends anything off.

Life goes back to what passes for normal. She invests a little more in paranoia, adding to her collection of stashes around Europe. She uses backdoor deals and false paperwork to buy a couple safe houses.

No one calls her by her real name anymore.

When two months go by without her seeing him, she sends him a text to get in touch. “Can’t have everybody I know not talking to me, lol.”

He appears a couple days later, and something is different. Something is off. He’s tense and won’t meet her eyes. He wipes his hands off on his jeans even though one doesn’t sweat anymore.

“Are you sick?” she asks on the second day. “If you need to lie down...”

He shakes his head and downs his beer. “Thanks for the offer, though.”

And yet he still lies down so that she can curl up against him.

He’s gone in the morning. The only thing that’s changed in the entire room is the pad by her bed, which is now missing several sheets. She peers at the paper, can only faintly see the scrawl, and when he still hasn’t shown up by lunch, lightly rubs a pencil over it.

It reveals nothing. She keeps at it while she waits for other things, tries every trick Aunt Peggy and SHIELD ever taught her.

She still has to piece it together in the end, and when she does, she’s not sure she’s got it right.

“S-

I like you

-B”

She swallows thickly and sits on the bed. She can’t have done this right. She must be filling in the gaps wrong. She must have done this wrong.

She digs out her phone. Normally, she only texts Steve. There’s no telling where he is or what he’s up to. But this time she risks the phone call.

“Everything okay?” he answers.

No one calls her by her name anymore, she thinks wryly. “Yeah. It’s fine. I was just- I think- Okay, this is going to sound weird, but-”

“But Buck is flirting extra hard with you?”

She freezes. Swallows. “What?”

“I mean, he- Is he not? I mean, if he’s not-”

“No, no. He’s not. He’s just being really awkward and left a note saying he liked me, but then took all but the last couple pages on the pad. I guess so I wouldn’t get suspicious if it turned up missing entirely.” She’d forgotten what it was like to talk to him. So much of his personality is lost in text, but the timbre of his voice is a comfort all on its own. The forthright way he speaks, the confidence, the hint of jest... Those certainly don’t hurt.

After a moment, Steve continues. “He got upset I wasn’t texting you enough and tracked me down,” he admits. “Said I’d better hurry and wrap things up before he made a move on you.”

“Aren’t you two friends?”

She hears a breath over the phone, almost like a laugh. “Sharon. I’m the worst person for you to date right now.”

“I know.”

“What?”

“I know,” she repeats.

“What?” he repeats.

She grins at the phone. “You’re the absolute worst person for me to date right now. I get it. I got it back when we were neighbors, I got it back when I was helping you, I get it now. I’m good with that. Still want to see where it goes.”

Steve is quiet. “I can’t drag you into what I’m doing right now.”

“That’s fine. Your best friend is making a move on me. Maybe I’ll steal him from you.”

“Seriously?”

“Hey, you can always fight me for him. Bring a glove. We’ll throw down.”

There’s another brush of air into the receiver. One day, she’s going to make him laugh so hard he falls out of a chair, she swears it.

“Seriously, Steve. You might have lived longer than most, but that doesn’t mean your life is short enough that you can’t try to be happy. You’ve got to have something to fight for, right? Someone to come home to. If that’s what would make you happy.”

“And you’d sit at home, waiting for me?”

“Oh, fuck no. If I’m done saving the world by then, sure, but I wouldn’t count on it. And God help you if you expect to come home at five o’clock and find a pot roast in the oven. The last pot roast I tried to make died a second death and then crumbled to dust. I didn’t even try to clean my oven after. I just moved.”

“Okay, so you’d finish saving the world and we’d order a pizza, or I’d pick something up on the way home.”

“Sure.”

They lapse into silence. She wonders if he’s thinking about a possible future for them both like she is.

“I’m going to try, Steve.” Her voice is soft. “With Bucky. I refuse to wait for you forever, and I want to see how it goes. I want someone to call me by my damn name again.”

“I’d call you by your name if you were here,” Steve says.

“But you’re not, Steve. And I’m not there. We have different ways of working, and that’s fine.” She licks her lips and wishes she had a drink. “When you’re done, we’ll see if we can still be anything. But until then, I’m going to go let your best friend be super awkward around me.”

She’s met with silence. Her phone grows hot while she waits for him to speak. “You know I care about you, Sharon.”

“I know. And I care about you, too. And maybe one day we’ll find out if we can love each other enough that we do more than text on the phone for over a year. But right now, we don’t do that. I think you see me as loyal and helpful, maybe cute. But you don’t know enough of the whole me to love me yet. I’ve killed people. I’ve fucked up. I’ve made mistakes. I can’t cook. I can’t draw. I can shoot a gun like nobody’s business. Maybe we can get to know each other better one day. Maybe you can get to know me, and we’ll see what we can become.”

“I’d like that.” His voice is tight. Rough.

“Me, too.” She clears her throat. This isn’t them saying good-bye, she tells herself. Just them agreeing to do something later, if it ever comes. “I just can’t wait around forever.”

“You don’t have to explain that to me.” He sounds strong again. Good. “I’ve missed out on too much because of waiting.”

“Then you’ll know to get your ass in gear and get your shit sorted out.”

“It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Sharon sighs. “Figures a Carter would have to show you how it’s done. Send me what you have and what you’re trying to do.”

“You’re going to help me while putting the moves on my best friend.”

“I get my shamelessness from both sides of the family,” she tells him. “Double shamelessness. Shamelessness squared.”

“Wow.” There’s a pause, and then he says, “Okay. Is your email address secure?”

* * *

It isn’t easy. It should be easy. It used to be easy. Or at least easier. He remembers how natural it had been to flirt with a girl.

But he’s not the person he used to be.

He finds her in a run-down cottage in Portugal. Tools are spread out on the patio. She’s spackling a section of the wall. He surveys the tools, then the building. “You need to reinforce that wood.”

“I’m a trained spy,” she counters, not turning to look at him. “Not a contractor.”

“A trained spy who’s going to die when the roof caves in on her.”

She glances at him over her shoulder. “I got this place for cheap. Now you see why.” She waves a hand around the building. It’s little more than a room. The kitchen area in the corner bleeds into the bedroom.

“Don’t tell me there’s an outhouse.”

She points to a small door on the other side of the house. “But you’ll wish there was an outhouse.”

He doesn’t believe her until later.

The process of fixing the house is slow. He doesn’t ask why she’s doing it, figures she has her reasons. Neither of them know what they’re doing, and they spend most of their time when not working in the town library or online, looking for definitions of certain words and tips.

Gradually, the house starts to look like a home. Bucky is the one who suggests a second story. She likes balconies and approves of the idea; he likes vantage points and builds the second story with that in mind. It isn’t easy work, but it’s easier than talking to her.

He calls T’Challa to update him and reassure him that he’s fine, his mind is his own. They talk, briefly, about what he’s doing, and then T’Challa says he can’t keep the president waiting any longer and to keep in touch. Bucky doesn’t ask which president it is; T’Challa seems to know them all, and Bucky isn’t sure he wants that life anymore, that life where he tries to influence history one way or the other. A week later, Okoye stops by. She might be there to keep an eye on him, but she pitches in with the work nonetheless. Bucky only knows when Okoye is bored when she asks to spar with him or Sharon.

In time, there’s less work to do and more relaxation. Okoye gives him pointed looks. She wants to go home, but he can’t bring himself to leave and have his questions weigh on him longer than they already have.

Sharon keeps busy. Even when the work involving tools is done, she keeps working. The rooms are painted. Pictures, none of them particularly personal, are hung. Furniture is acquired. The place is hodgepodge, a work of affection and determination rather than taste in design. Bucky can’t decide if he likes it.

It takes him far too long to realize Sharon avoids looking at him as much as he avoids looking at her. They watch each other out of the corners of their eyes. He watches her more closely, sees the way she tenses when he’s around, like a wire stretched taut. He doesn’t know what to do.

Okoye gets bored and leaves will little ado. Now it’s just the two of them, sharing a bed but avoiding each other in every other way. Their conversations are stilted. They are both capable spies, but they can’t be honest with each other and can’t convincingly lie, either. 

Days pass. Bucky thinks that cryo would be easier to deal with than this. In the end, that’s what decides him. Because he’s been doing so much running and hiding, and he knows that if he does it again now, he’ll never stop.

He needs to tell her, he decides. He knows he needs to tell her. Just spit it out. Sink or swim. Do or die. After all, what woman wouldn’t want a former brainwashed assassin whose arm could snap her neck with ease?

She tries to make dinner one night; he knows because the house suddenly smells of rancid smoke. She turns off the stove, and they stumble out into the night. 

Bucky opens a window from the outside. “Sandwiches not good enough?”

She goes to the next window. “Thought I’d try to make a roast.”

“How about you leave that to me next time.”

She rolls her eyes. “Figures you can make a roast, too.”

He shrugs. “It’s not that hard.” He glances at the house. “It isn’t supposed to be, at any rate.”

She flips him off and keeps opening windows.

They sleep outside on the porch that night, guns in easy reach, and the next night he makes a roast. He isn’t the cook Steve is, but he thinks it’s edible. 

It doesn’t occur to him until he sees her wearing a dress that this might not be a normal dinner. He sets her plate in front of her and forces himself to speak. “You wanna go dancing sometime?”

She raises an eyebrow at him. The nearby town is too small for a club.

“Go out sometime,” he amends.

She smiles, and it’s a smile that makes his body warm and makes him wonder what he was worried about. “About damn time you asked,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about how to ask you out.”

He drops into the seat across from her. He’s quiet. He takes a bite of the roast, notes that it’s too dry. “You could have fucking said something,” he complains without malice.

She shrugs. “At first, I’d figure you’d get around to it. And then you didn’t, so I started thinking of how I could tell you, and I... almost burned the house down.”

She smiles again, and he sets his fork down. “Let’s go into town to eat,” he suggests. “Splurge.”

“Or we could just make sandwiches,” she counters. “Stay in.”

This time she doesn’t smile, but the way she looks at him makes him smile. He pauses and holds up his arm. “I can be dangerous.”

She carries their dishes to the sink. “So can I.”

“I’ll have to go back to Wakanda. You can’t trust me, Sharon.”

She leans against the counter, watching him. “I trust you. I still don’t know Russian.”

He almost laughs, but its a soft, awkward sound. “There are other ways I can hurt you.”

She moves closer. “I trust you.” Slowly, carefully, she lays a hand on his right arm, and his muscles spasm at her touch. She doesn’t back away, though. He looks up at her, but she doesn’t move. “Up to you.” Only then does she pull away.

He catches her hand and pulls her into his lap. His kiss his hurried and sloppy, accidentally chaste against the corner of her lips. He tries again. This time, his aim is right and she parts her lips and the kiss isn’t chaste and isn’t meant to be. Everything she hadn’t cleaned from the table is soon on the ground and broken. But they’ve waited too long to let broken salt shakers stop them. She just laughs and holds him closer, and he smiles against her lips.

* * *

He can’t stay forever. They’ve barely left the cottage in the past several days, only leaving to make food runs, but he has places to go and people to see and a head to get straightened out.

She can’t stay forever, either. The house in Portugal is a house of dreams, a house of ghosts. Soon, she will find herself in fights so dire, with blood on her hands and in her hair and under her nails, that this house won’t even seem real. 

But until then, she is happy that she didn’t wait, and she likes to think that he, too, is happy. One day, they will meet again, whether in battle or in the quiet, and she will not wait any longer. She will kiss him, and talk with him, and be with him, because life is too short and too dangerous and too cruel not to grab whatever small thread of happiness she can.


End file.
